Up to this point, we've been talking about conditioning as
if it occurred in a vacuum – that
organisms come into the environment as a tabula rasa, capable of learning any
one thing as easily as anything else. But organisms bring a rich genetic
endowment to theirinteractions with the environment, and their inheritance
influences what they are likely to do, when they are likely to do it, and their
capacity for learning certain kinds of connections between their behavior and
environmental contingencies.When there
is a conflict between learned and instinctual behavior, organisms sometimes.
Whydo things that don't fit the simple
model of conditioning first put forth by John B. Watson,and to a lesser extent B. F. Skinner. In
the 1950's, some behaviorists came to call theseconflicts between learned and instinctual behavior misbehavior.
Misbehavior occurs whenthe
contingencies of reinforcement alone can not explain the behavior of the
organism.

2

The term misbehavior comes from a 1961 American Psychologist
article by Keller andMarion Breland
entitled The Misbehavior of Organisms. The title was a playful jab at B.
F.Skinner, their mentor, whose 1938
book The Behavior of Organisms is widely viewed asthe seminal work in the development of the experimental analysis
of behavior. In thisarticle, the
Breland's talked about how their conditioning of animals was more or lessdifficult depending on the species-specific
behaviors of the animals they were training. Forexample, teaching a chicken to "dance" is pretty
easy--as it waits for food, chickensnaturally "scratch" at the ground, which resembles dancing.
Trying to train a chicken tostand
still to obtain food, however, is quite difficult. If you are a chicken, you
scratch theground when obtaining
food is likely. Chickens don't stand around waiting for food. It's in the
nature of the beast to scratch. You can try your best to reinforce a chicken
for standing still, but it just won't do it. The closer it gets to the time
when food will be presented, the more difficult the chicken finds it to stand
still, even if standing still is what's being reinforced.The reason why the Brelands considered this
to be misbehavior is that it should be just as easy to shape a chicken for
standing still as for scratching if in fact all operants arecreated equal. But there is a wired-in
(biological) connection between scratching and foodfor a chicken.

How does
misbehavior affect the general applicability of

conditioning
principles?

Instinctive Drift-- The classic example of misbehavior
described by Keller and MarionBreland. While training animals to perform "human" type
actions for TV commercials,animals would perform well for a while, then their
behavior would deteriorate for no apparent reason -- they were still being
reinforced, etc., but the control exerted by the contingencies of reinforcement
were no longer maintaining the behavior. But themisbehavior was nonrandom --
there was a characteristic pattern to the deterioration ofthe operantly maintained behavior. For
example, if a pig was being conditioned to put acoin in a piggy bank (I remember seeing this ad as a youth
growing up in Los Angeles,where the
Brelands had their business), everything would go fine for a while, but then
thepig would get into rooting the
coin around the floor, and the reinforced chain of behaviorswould break down. The Brelands saw this
as misbehavior in that the principles of behaviorwould suggest that any behavior that does not lead to
reinforcement would be dropped,yet
this behavior, even though it delayed, or even prevented reinforcement, not
only developed but became more elaborate. Why would the pig misbehave? Well,
pigs will be pigs. Pigs, by their genetic nature, root their food. The coin is
associated with food, so the pig starts rooting the coin. Racoons, in a similar
training situation, began washing the coin, a typically raccoon thing to do.
The significance of this misbehavior was not lost onother behaviorists, and the work of the Brelands lead to a
revolution in the scientificanalysis of behavior, the result of which we will explore in the final
unit of the semester.

3

Autoshaping:

Autoshaping - an
animal will automatically condition itself

instinctually
if motivated. Pigeons peck at an illuminated disc prior

to eating.
This learn to do this automatically.

Autoshaping. Normal shaping of a pigeon to peck a key,
using successive approximations, takesabout an hour to get a naive pigeon to
peck the key reliably. Suppose, though, instead of thelaborious process of
successive approximations, we simply arrange some programmingequipment to
present a hungry pigeon with grain once a minute, turn on the key light
tenseconds before each presentation of food, go get a cup of coffee, and come
back later and seewhat happened? That's all autoshaping is. Keypecks, when they
eventually occur, are reinforced

with food, just like with regular shaping. Yet, the
pigeon does come to peck the key with this procedure, and in about half the
time that it makes to condition it by successive approximations. As is true
with many of the examples ofmisbehavior, autoshaping was viewed as a curiosity
when experiments demonstrating it were

first published. The curiosity came from the fact that,
even though no specific response wasbeing reinforced, autoshaping produced
conditioning more rapidly than when a specificresponse was being shaped. People
soon recognized the Pavlovian nature of the autoshaping procedure, and began
talking about the elicitation of what is normally considered an operant
response.

Superstitious behavior

Page 5

The infamous .5

Superstitious behavior arises when the delivery of a
reinforcer or punisher occurs close together in time(temporal contiguity) with
an independent behavior. Therefore, the behavior is accidentally reinforced
orpunished, increasing the likelihood of that behavior occurring again.

For example, you walk under a ladder and a minute later
you trip and fall. It is easy to attribute your

accident to "bad luck" and the irrelevant
ladder. The reason an association is easy to form is because your

cultural belief that walking under a ladder will bring
bad luck is positively reinforced by your fall that

occurred soon after walking under the ladder.

Common North American Superstitions

Here's a
sampling of what we've collected to date. Most North American kids know this
one: